Thursday, December 6, 2007

Atheist porn

A friend of mine (Hi, Bill!) sent me a link to a story at The New Republic called, "Atheism's Wrong Turn." It's a decent article, and I recommend reading the whole thing. The basic point is that the crop of current, media-ready atheists -- Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens -- aren't liberal atheists who push for a system that respects beliefs, but illiberal, evangelical atheists who want to eradicate God from public discourse.

The author, Damon Linker, sees this as a problem for liberal humanists, as the tendency for deists might be to paint liberal churchgoers with some of the paint spatterings of illiberal atheists, since there is some overlap between "separation of church and state," and "separation of church and reality."

I agree, to an extent. I think most of my Christian friends can pretty easily separate out the religious views of angry atheists from the political views of liberal believers, such as myself. The fact that I am not a fundamentalist and Christopher Hitchens is not a fundamentalist shouldn't really confuse any but the most cross-eyed of conservative believers.

What is more interesting to me is the phenomenal sales records of the atheist, anti-God tomes that these four have authored (see below). The percentage of people who say they do not believe in God in this country is quite small. According to a Wikipedia article that quotes the 2001 "American Religious Identification Survey," about 15% of Americans identified themselves in 2001 as "agnostic/atheist/no religion," s up from 8.4% in 1991.

What motivates someone to buy a book that argues, quite strongly, against a belief in God? Not against a particular religious belief, or for a type of practice... but argues that God just doesn't exist? If you are already an atheist, it is, I would think, a waste of time. If you aren't an atheist, as I assume many of their readers are not, why buy such a book?

I think it's a kind of spiritual/religious porn. That's what I think.

Not porn in the sense that it's bad/wrong/nasty to argue against a belief in God. As a liberal Christian, I'm all for a society where your disbelief in God is as respected as my belief. So there's nothing *wrong* with these books, per se. I've read some of Christopher Hitchen's work and he's quite brilliant at times as well as entertaining.

No... I mean that, I think, the impetus for many believers who read these books is one of religious prurience. It feels naughty to buy and read a nicely bound, well authored book that argues vehemently against the very existence of a being to whom you are bound as a servant and worshiper. It's shocking. It's (maybe) a little creepy. It's exciting. And you're pretty sure you shouldn't be doing it. You know... porn.

I think it's a great idea for believers -- of any faith -- to be familiar with these works, or at least the major arguments from them. And you should do so as if seeing a naked body in a medical film, as opposed to watching hard-core scrunt. It may be interesting and compelling in some similar ways, but it has education at its heart, rather than titillation.

If you can't read well-reasoned arguments against your faith and come up with good rebuttals, you need to question your faith. I don't mean "question" in the sense of "doubt," but you need to ask questions, and get answers, to help you understand the issues at stake.

A good friend of mine and I (same guy, "Hi, again, Bill!") once came to the conclusion, during a long religious discussion, that core religious beliefs must not require high levels of brain power or rigorous intellectual scrutiny. Why? Because then God would be prejudiced in favor of the smart. I believe one statement to come out of that discussion was, "God would not require that we reason our way into Heaven."

Many (if not most or all) arguments for atheism boil down to a belief (yes, atheism is a belief) that (some) intellectual arguments are more valid than (supposedly) emotional arguments for faith. And while reason can certainly be applied to aspects of faith, in the end... the word "faith" itself is the qualifier. If it made complete, abject, logical sense... it would be science, wouldn't it.

So have a go at one of the atheist manifestos, if you like. Take a peek behind the curtain at some rigorous, impassioned arguing. It may feel like porn, but it's more like a trip to the doctor; it's good to shine a light into some dark places in order to understand what that pain is.